Writing about send + receive, and sound art in general, creates a paradox, as one has to rely heavily on the left, quantitative, hemisphere of the brain, the one responsible for “visual space,” as it is the mind-space of civilization proceeding for the last four millennia of linearity, according to the Winnipeg-raised media prophet Marshall McLuhan. And yet in order to write about it one has to attempt to bring forward the notions of “acoustic space” which is a projection of the right hemisphere based on qualitative thinking (multi-centered + holistic, rather than mono-centered).

Send + receive Festival was launched in 1998, as a project of Video Pool Media Arts Centre, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the relative isolation provided by the North American prairies. Since its inception, send + receive has not ceased to tease the imagination of the Canadian and international public by becoming one of the key hubs for sound art, connecting local, national, and international artists, critics, and theorists alike. The Festival has served as an international and inter-cultural meeting place of sound arts and technologies in its acoustic and technological forms, influencing the discussions about artistic practices, critical reflections, and theoretical discourses characterized by electronic culture in general and sound art in particular.

Send + receive has achieved a noteworthy national and international importance by exploring the creation and practice of sound artists such as Michael Dumontier, Ken Gregory, Martin Tétreault, Théophile Billich, Bruce Russell, Stelios Giannoulakis, John Levack Drever, Ed Osborn, Carsten Nicolai, Angela Somerset, Net-Radio pioneers such as Susan Kennard and Heath Bunting, and more recently the historical legends of sound art—Charlemagne Palestine and Tony Conrad.

Sarah Davachi at send + receive V16.

This year’s overarching theme of send + receive was “physical sound” with emphasis on the physicality of the body which generates sounds, the sensory apparatus, and the physiological and psychological ways in which sounds have effect on us. However, the complexity of sound does not allow for convenient classifications, as it generally challenges standard assumptions by bringing to the surface the experiences of the active listener stemming from their own perspectives, thus resulting in a certain sonic subjectivity. The experiencing of sound art itself becomes itself a phenomenological inquiry of the audience. In other words, sound art becomes the object of the “lived experience.” In effect, the physical sound refers to the notions of corporeality of the body generating the sound. That being the case, our relation to the source of the sound becomes immensely important in experiencing the actual sound artwork. This source of sound can signify a certain relationality to the “lived other,” as evidenced by the spectacular performance work of US-based Ellen Fullman (accompanied by cellist Okkyung Lee) who plays the “Long String Instrument” developed by Fullman, built of numerous suspended piano wires covering the length of the Ukrainian Labour Temple. Or it can refer to the spatiality, or felt space, as is the case with Ottawa-based Donna Legault’s site specific installation titled “Subtle Territory.” Whereas Fullman’s performance, insists on tones and harmonics being controlled with delicate movements by the rosin-coated fingers of the artist herself, Legault’s installation presents us with a certain “defamiliarization effect.” Namely, the artwork was installed within Winnipeg’s landmark Cube at Old Market Square, which serves as a stage for various bands and performers throughout the year. The surprising effect stems from the fact that although at first sight the Cube seems not to have any sort of Function, passersby are able to experience audible tones coming from the inside of the Cube which are in effect captured and transformed low frequencies from the physical environment itself.

The biggest surprise of S+R was Winnipeg-based trio Burden. Caitlin Hutchison, Shelagh Pizey-Allen, and Doreen Girard were able to impress the audience by fully exploring aspects of physical sound in its temporal, spatial and bodily dimensions by vigorous and spirited pulling and rubbing of the soundboard of a piano placed on Media Hub’s floor. The audience was fully immersed in the artwork and responded very enthusiastically to it. Burden is a force to be reckoned with. Calgary-born and Vancouver-based Sarah Davachi was impressive as a performer with her psychoacoustic investigations, as was her lecture at the Black Lodge of the Winnipeg Film Group, where she appeared in the role of historian/theorist of sound art relating to the rise of experimental electronic music in the 60s and 70s, key historical figures, and their artworks. Notions of alternative psychosomatic environments were also explored in the presentation. The physicality of the body and the intersection where the sensory system meets the psychological apparatus was explored in New York-based Okkyung Lee and Michelle Boulé’s improvising performance at the Media Hub by means of using sound, light, and dance.

Okkyung Lee practices with Michelle Boulé prior to their performance at the Media Hub for send + receive V16.

Under the skilful organizational and artistic leadership of Director crys cole (herself being also an internationally renowned sonic artist helps s + r immensely) and with a dedicated Board and volunteers, send + receive has succeeded in finding new strategies for the dynamic exploration of sound and media arts, as well as in finding ways to adjust towards the ever-developing concepts and technologies which surround us, as it has become obvious that society and technology co-constitute each other. I remain confident that the broad experimentation platform which send + receive Festival has established for the presentation and research of sound art reflects a cultural transformation happening in the beginning of the 21st century, one that can assist us in the visualizing of our future, and one that points out to the phenomenology of sound, the felt or experienced sound, the thingness of sound. For if we truly exist in a society where we transit regularly between visual and acoustic space, then sound art with its apparent, as well as hidden qualities becomes indicative for the understanding of the current cultural shift between the two mind-spaces.

Dr. Melentie Pandilovski is a curator, media art critic and theorist. He is currently Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. He has curated more than 150 exhibitions and organized numerous symposia, conferences, and workshops, in Europe, Australia, and Canada. His theoretical research deals with examination of the links between art, culture, technology, individual identity, and consciousness.

Notes

Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument inevitably strikes a chord with Australian sound artist Alan Lamb’s pioneering work “The Wires,” an instrument consisting of tightly strained spans of fencing wire that stretch up to 300 metres across the West Australian desert landscape.

“I’d often ask Éric ‘Weather’s always nice here, isn’t it?’ He’d answer, ‘Well, dad, today it’s raining’ and I’d tell him ‘Right, but even when it rains, it’s nice here because there’s no stress, no fights. We’re home,” recalled Clermont with longing. Eric, his son, was one of the forty-seven victims who perished when a freight train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in the center of Lac-Mégantic, a town of about six thousand in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. In an instant, at quarter past one in the morning of July 6th, 2013, what was a lovely warm night turned into a prolonged darkness. The midsummer dream became a nightmare.

Months later, Clermont was sharing his thoughts with Michel Huneault, a Montreal-based photographer intent on documenting the aftermath of the tragedy. Like most, he had learned about the catastrophe on the morning news. At the time, information was scarce, facts seemed to contradict one another, and no one could agree on the scope of the destruction. “When an event shrouded in such mystery and uncertainty, the thing to do is to go see for yourself, to bear witness and to look for missing details,” explains the thirty-eight year-old who, following his journalistic instincts, arrived on site later that evening. A few flames continued to bask the town in a sinister orange glow and thick smoke engulfed the streets. Stunned, locals sought refuge where they could.

“I had been filing photos at the local pizzeria, one of the only places still open with a decent Internet connection. As I was putting my computer away in my car, a Méganticois approached me. He looked forlorn. I asked him how he was doing and we chatted for 20 minutes. It was clear that he needed to talk, to unload what had been burdening him. As soon as he left, someone else showed up wanting to do the same,” Huneault recalls. It became clear to him that the long process to recovery for the townspeople would require a benevolent ear and a compassionate gaze.

“La longue nuit de Mégantic,” a photographic series, which won last year’s Portfolio Reviews Exhibition Award at the CONTACT festival and currently on view at the Toronto gallery, offers a glimpse into the personal and collective grief of the shattered Quebec community. Taken mostly in the dim light of dusk and dawn, the images hint at the emotions felt by those affected by the tragedy from sorrow to anger to forbearance. A deer caught in headlight conjures bewilderment, a man skiing by the railroad track on New Year’s Eve evokes resilience; a train fighting its way through a snowstorm inspire fear. “Grief is not something that evolves in a linear fashion. There are moments of utmost darkness, and there are some sunny spells,” notes Michel Huneault, who traveled to the stricken region several times over the course of a year.

Though moving, his work avoids the pitfall of being overly sentimental or intrusive. Having grown up in a similar municipality in the Laurentides, he was able to understand and relate to the Méganticois he met effortlessly. He knew which distance to keep, when to bring out the camera, and also when to excuse himself to give them breathing space. “Because we were made from the same cloth, we understood each other without words. There was no need for extensive questioning which could have become unnecessarily invasive. Sometimes, nods and small gestures told me as much as I need to know,” he says. Similarly, his photos do not show trauma or recovery, they suggest it.

In such tragic circumstances, the role of the photographer is a delicate one, especially when he commits himself overtime. He becomes a friend, a therapist, a mirror and a megaphone. Michel Huneault, thanks to previous experiences, navigates these seamlessly. As a Berkeley graduate student, he examined how collective memory is constructed in the aftermath of large social trauma, such as the genocide in Guatemala. At the time, he also met Gilles Peress, a member of the renowned Magnum photo agency, who opened his eyes to the part that imagery plays in helping societies shape shared narratives. But, it was only after a stint at Canadian International Development Agency, one that took him to Afghanistan, that he embraced photography as a full-time endeavor. Thereafter, he traveled to places in the midst of reconstruction: Ukraine during the Orange revolution, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the Japanese Tohoku coast post-tsunami.

Hence, “La longue nuit de Mégantic” is not merely the culmination of a year of travels to grieving Lac-Mégantic presenting the breadth of the loss, but also the latest installment of a serial exploring how societies overcome troubled pasts.

“La longue nuit de Mégantic” is on view at CONTACT Gallery, 80 Spadina (suite 205), Toronto, until March 13, 2015. The exhibition will then travel to Lac-Mégantic in spring.

Laurence Butet-Roch is a freelance writer, photo editor and photographer. After completing a B.A. in International Relations at the University of British Columbia, she pursued photography at the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa. Today, she is a member of the Boreal collective and collaborates with several publications in English and French.

“At the corner” features new work by Winnipeg-based artists Irene Bindi and Aston Coles. The work in the exhibition considers the “behind the curtain” experience of the cinematic. By reinterpreting the fourth wall, the artists create works that suspend the viewer and eliminate reliance on traditional storytelling. Bindi and Coles use collage and installation to reference screen based experiences that challenge and confront the notion of the filmic. While both artists work independently, cohesive themes emerge, such as the deconstruction of the image and the experiential qualities of film-based media. This exhibition explores an abstract picture of cinema, turned inside out and re-imagined as film without film. This interview elaborates on these themes and more that arise from the work in the exhibition.

Collin Zipp: Your work speaks to the experiential qualities of film. What kind of screen-based experiences are you interested in commenting on, or hoping to invoke?

Aston Coles: Our thinking about film eventually led to the removal of the film itself; toward various diverging and unpremeditated ends. Some part of this is aimed at seeing the screen as the homing beacon it is, evoking it by tracing out its usual shape again and again.

Irene Bindi: The screen experiences that have had an effect on us are usually those of experimental film or film art that exploit the medium’s material qualities. When you’re not messing around with stories, you’re freed up to do more direct thinking about what you’re seeing. You can pay a different kind of attention to movement, the frame, rhythm, etc. You can still let go of time as with cinema, but without losing awareness in a story.

CZ: Removal of both film and narrative also translates into an absence of the mechanical apparatus behind cinema. What is your interest in this subtraction?

AC: Separately, a handful of parts of the film apparatus (including some of the non-mechanical parts) are particularly well suited to dealing with two or three art questions I’ve been thinking about. The breaking down and use of some parts of the cinema is really just the shortest path from A to B.

IB: There is this myth of film (the physical stuff) as a medium of nostalgia, and the machines of cinema perpetuate that myth because they can become fetish objects and distractions. Of course in some contexts the projector works very well as an art object, or part of an expanded cinema experience. For “At the corner,” I’ve used a 16mm camera and film, but have translated each film image into a paper collage, removing most of the traditional mechanical elements of cinema, except for the screen.

CZ: Regarding the title of the exhibition, can you explain your interpretation of a corner?

AC: This work pays a lot of attention to the drift away from centre; unprepared segments in the background of a scripted planned operation. So we mean the corner of a composition, for instance. The corner is an easy reference point and you’re going to find it anywhere you look. Being a non-standard focal point, the intentional diversion of focus is bound to cause unknown things to come out. At the corner also suggests a certain personal commonplace, like I’ll be at the corner, unless I’m lying on the floor staring at the fan.

IB: With traditional cinema, or flat art, the corner is the most obvious place where the art ends and everything else begins. You can think of a corner as a place of stoppage, or even entrapment, but the corner is also the opposite: a place for the infinite—like the finest point that can never be found. The collages reflect some of the former, as they depict some of the still corners of our house. The corner of the eye comes to mind too—those things that creep in at the sides that you’re not sure you saw.

CZ: There is an element of illusion in the work. Is it important for you that the viewer is somewhat veiled and not be given an easy in?

AC: Yes. As with film, this show doesn’t happen all at once. There is a certain lack of content so, in that regard, the viewer has a bit of work to do—or not do—for themselves.

IB: An “easy in” is not interesting to me, but illusion isn’t a goal either. If there is some illusory element in my work it’s accidental and probably a by-product of the process of image taking and remaking.

CZ: Irene, your images are based on banal domestic scenes. What was the motivation for using these images?

IB: I was at home taking care of my young son, it was winter, and what was most available to shoot was the interior and exterior of our house. There was so much blank clutter available to me, whether a clutter under the sink or the clutter of light on a wall. It’s also very useful to have boring images, because it helps you shift focus to other elements. Choosing these silent corners of the house was also a way of exploring the stillness/motion relationship in shooting film. A still scene caught in motion can become so dynamic, so time bending and surreal, if you give it the attention it requires.

CZ: Can you talk about the act of looking and/or the positioning of the gaze? Are you more interested in the act of observing or that which is being observed?

AC: Euclid and Ptolemy had rather a beautiful idea that light was something that came out of the eyes and struck objects, illuminating them like a flashlight. They saw a conical beam of radiation coming out of the eyes, reaching into space. I think that theory could be applied metaphorically as a cipher for better understanding and appreciation of art. My interest is in the act of observing. The object of that observation is to suggest a way of looking. It is not an end in itself but hopefully a catalyst to seeing something new.

IB: Originally, I was so interested in capturing the stillness of those moments at home that I wanted to construct the collages to scale with the objects they depicted. The sensation that occurs in the moment of looking was important—probably more important than the subject. But during the process of translating the film images into collage, what I was observing, what I was interested in, was the particular qualities of the medium: the look and feel of a frame of 16mm film. Translating it into another medium was an effort to make that look and feel clearer for the viewer. The film frame—which is not the same as a projected image—is enlarged; its colours are replicated and in some cases intensified.

CZ: Can you speak to the idea that the image a camera produces turns the subject into an object, distancing the viewer from the viewed?

AC: That distancing is good for the world of populist art, commercial art and museums. It is the plinth—the viewer is flattered and denied passage at the same time. It is really hard to avoid because it is so entrenched in the way people see art. We are trying to apply the convention of viewer separation inversely, implicating the viewer in the making. My approach here is to obscure the view, or camouflage the image in banality and everyday visual experience.

IB: This idea is related to what I was saying about a translated image. The image as object makes the subject so dismissible, even alienating. It can bring about different meaning or even usurp the original, and that can be good. This may just be bad translation—as, indeed, the collages are bad translations of film stills—but there is something nice in the gaps of translation. The subject is still available, but it has fallen away to the other elements that are being explored.

CZ: The work in this exhibition continues your interest in film-without-film. Can you talk about this progression and further, how cinema can exist outside of the traditional frame?

IB: For me film encompasses more than the physical setup of a cinema and projector. And because film, or a type of cinema, is visual art, I also see visual art as cinema; and in the same way that film can be explored in terms of various material and spatial considerations, the collages in this exhibition look at the spatial and temporal concerns of experimental film.

AC: Film, sound and performance, all being time-based forms, satisfy my need to make work that happens in time and more specifically, in the moment of making. When I say film here I mean film-without-film: the application of various traditional tenets of film, minus the film itself. So the eye of the viewer and my own eye replace the camera and the film in one. I believe cinema exists in the experience of everyday life, independent of the notion of film.

Irene Bindi is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist. Her collage, film, and sound works have appeared at various Canadian venues including Send + Receive Festival of Sound, Suoni Per il Popolo, Aceartinc., Antimatter, Cinémathèque québécoise, Pleasure Dome, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and the Cinematheque Ontario, as well as an exhibitions at the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN and performances at the Alamo Drafthouse Austin TX, The Kosmos Albuquerque NM, and the Circle Cinema Tulsa OK. Irene received her MA in Film & Video from York University. She was a member of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image curatorial collective from 2011-2015 and has collaborated on sound/noise projects Blind Squab and Double Hook with Aston Coles since 2009.

Aston Coles is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Winnipeg, MB. He uses sound, performance, installation and sculpture as tools for situating both the viewer and artist into otherwise unlikely circumstances toward a shared experience. He is currently working on a series of short duration sound and video installations about transient events and their associated movements and sounds. He is part of Blind Squab and Double Hook along with Irene Bindi, and performs solo noise as Single White Female.

Collin Zipp is a multidisciplinary artist and programmer/curator who is based in Winnipeg, MB. His visual practice includes video, photo, sculpture, painting and installation and is interested in exploring ideas of institutional critique and viewer expectation and experience. Zipp currently operates and programs the nomadic artist-run centre ONE NIGHT STAND. He has a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from the University of Lethbridge.